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Texas Catches Fire

Library of CongressA funeral for pro-Union German-Americans in Texas. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Even as Texas prepared for war, its fate within the Confederacy sealed, parts of the state still seethed with Union sentiment. And no place was more fervently pro-Union that spring than Bexar County and its largest city, San Antonio, the home of the Alamo, the very cradle of Texas independence.

Indeed, even as Union troops marched off to the coast to evacuate after surrendering their armory, Col. C.A. Waite, who had arrived too late to stop the debacle, reported home on April 1, 1861, that Unionism in the city remained strong. Waite predicted that just “a few thousand dollars expended on the press would revolutionize sentiment in Texas.”

Waite was wrong; two-thirds of Texas had voted to secede. Yet some Union sentiment would linger throughout the war. As many as a third of all Texans would continue to support the Union, historians later estimated. Some, out of love for Texas, would resign themselves to fight for the Confederacy. Some would be effectively silenced or would flee. And still others would pay for their loyalty with their lives, strung up or shot down.

In San Antonio, James P. Newcomb was a young newspaper man who decided inadvertently to test Waite’s thesis. Having started the Weekly Alamo Express the previous year, Newcomb made his pro-Union views widely known. He published notice of a public meeting in the plaza, to be held on April 9, for the purpose of “restoring harmony and prosperity to our distracted country.” Two speakers addressed the crowd and Newcomb later called it “a glorious night. We have given the Reconstruction ball a roll. Let it be kept rolling over the state until all the opposition is crushed out.” For good measure, he added that the Confederacy was “conceived in sin” and called Jefferson Davis a weak, vile traitor.

Retribution came quick: Newcomb returned to find his office destroyed and his printing press at the bottom of the San Antonio River, courtesy of the pro-secession Knights of the Golden Circle and Confederate Rangers. Newcomb fled and, eventually, joined the Union army.

Unionist sentiment took varying forms. Where Newcomb was outspoken, others simply and quietly refused to support the Confederacy — or the Union, for that matter. Ousted from the governorship in Austin, Sam Houston, for one, was offered the chance to lead Union forces in retaking Texas by President Lincoln, who thought he saw a chance to break Texas off from the Confederacy. Yet Houston refused, not wanting Texans to spill the blood of other Texans. Learning, too, that Waite was attempting to raise a force near Indianola to restore him to office as governor, he wrote to the Army officer: “Allow me most respectfully to decline any such assistance of the United States government.”

Library of CongressJ.W. Throckmorton

Others, like politicians E.W. Cave, B.H. Epperson and J.W. Throckmorton, embraced the cause of the Confederacy despite their misgivings. Throckmorton was the most outspoken Unionist at the Secession Convention, having opposed secession for two solid years, alongside Houston. He donned a gray uniform, however, and became a skilled soldier, organizing a 100-man mounted rifle company, securing forts on the frontier and joining the Sixth Texas Cavalry. He fought at the battles of Chustennallah and Elkhorn and rose to the rank of brigadier general.

In contrast, A.J. Hamilton would also become a brigadier general — but a Union one. A man who would neither be silenced nor sit idly by, he fled Austin upstream into the rough country of the Colorado River’s bends, forests and caves, crossing into Mexico and eventually making his way to Washington where he would receive his commission. When the war was finally over, he was made provisional governor of Texas.

All together some 2,000 Texans would fight for the Union. Edmund Jackson Davis, a south Texas judge, led the Union’s First Texas Cavalry, which fought in south Texas early in the war. A second Texas Union cavalry regiment was led by John L. Haynes, a former state legislator from Rio Grande City, composed primarily of Mexicans. Both units would fight later in the war in Louisiana.

Texas historians believe that about one-third of Texans, actively or passively, supported the Union as war unfurled. The common man, however, did not get a Union commission as general. Instead, he usually got a threat. On May 25, 1861, a self-appointed Committee of Safety left an otherwise anonymous letter for a Mr. A. Newman, suspected of harboring abolitionist views: “Leave the country at once … else you will be dealt with according to mob law.”

In Cooke County, north of Dallas, a Unionist organization known as the Peace Party began to form in secret. But a drunken party leader revealed the group’s plans and Confederate officers penetrated the organization. The news spread like wildfire and ignited rumors of Unionists planning arson and murder. The population took matters into its own hands and hanged 25 Unionists without a trial. A little later a trial was held for others, where more than 40 were hanged.

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But it would be Confederate conscription that would chafe the most at Texas Unionists. The Germans of the Hill Country, in particular, would actively resist both conscription and the Confederacy. One plot called upon “all German Brothers” to “hang [Texans] by their feet and burn them from below.” As the historian Mary Jo O’Rear put it later, “Vague distrust exploded into blind rage.” And that went for both sides: As dissent grew over the hot summer of 1862, Confederate cavalry and Partisan Rangers moved into the Hill Country, catching 100 Germans on the move to Mexico to join the federal army. On the banks of the clear Nueces River, the Confederates killed 32 men in a surprise attack. Not a single prisoner was taken, according to the historian Claude Elliott. Nine more men were murdered after the fighting: the wounded were killed on the spot and the rest taken to White Oak Creek, where they were hanged or shot. The Confederates then made their way to Gillespie, where there they captured and hanged another 50 men. The war, already raging in the east, had come home to Texas.

Richard Parker is a journalist in Texas and has twice been the visiting professional in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. His opinion columns on national and international affairs are syndicated by the McClatchy-Tribune Information Service.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.